BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraqi leaders expressed confidence yesterday that they could break the stalemate over the country's new constitution, though they gave only the slightest hints that they were prepared to compromise.

After failing Monday to meet the deadline for completing Iraq's constitution, some of the country's most powerful political leaders stepped forward to assure ordinary Iraqis that the deadlock was a temporary one.

Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, President Jalal Talabani and Hussein Shahrastani, a leading Shiite member of the Iraqi National Assembly, all described their disagreements as minor ones that would be solved by the new deadline, this coming Monday.

"There are no issues without solutions," Talabani said at a new conference. "The points left are very few, such as the role of Islam, human rights and the rights of women. There is a general agreement on them, but we need to word them precisely."

The night before, Iraqi leaders were hung up on central questions, including the control of oil, the role of Islam, the rights of women and Shiite self-rule in the south. During the evening, new disagreements emerged, like the desire of Kurdish leaders to have some right to secede and a renewed push by Shiite leaders to have their senior religious leaders, known collectively as the Marjariya, declared independent of the government.

The stalemate has given rise to concerns of a political crisis that could erode confidence in Iraq's fledgling democratic process and feed the discontent driving the insurgency.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday called the delay "unhelpful" and warned that further delays risked prolonging the fighting. The sooner the constitution is completed, he said on a trip to South America, "the fewer Iraqis will be killed and the fewer Americans and coalition forces will be killed."

But some Iraqi leaders said yesterday that they were considering dissolving the National Assembly and calling new elections, a move that would set back the democratic process by many months. Under the timetable agreed to by U.S. and Iraqi leaders, the constitution was to be completed by Aug. 15 and voted on by Iraqis on Oct. 15.

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad also downplayed the obstacles to an agreement. He attributed the failure to meet the deadline in part to what he described as "technical problems," like not having enough computers or large enough support staff who could quickly produce working versions of the text.

Some people involved in drafting the constitution said the difficulties were more substantial. A person close to the Kurdish leadership said Shiite members responsible for compiling changes to the constitution quietly reinserted a proposal regarding the Shiite religious leadership that they had previously agreed to take out.

Khalilzad appeared to allude to this, saying, "I found myself that some articles eliminated in an early draft reappeared in the final draft."

Most of the leaders of the main groups – the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds – indicated they intended to stick to their demands, even ones that other groups said would doom a constitution.

Sunni leaders, for instance, said they would not accept a semiautonomous region in southern Iraq, an area dominated by the Shiites, arguing that a largely autonomous Shiite region, combined with the Kurdish autonomous area already in place in northern Iraq, could render the Iraqi state meaningless.